Inexpensive Indulgences

Sometimes I wonder whether these various forms of giving back have become to our era what the papal indulgence was to the Middle Ages: a relatively inexpensive way of getting oneself seemingly on the right side of justice, without having to alter the fundamentals of one’s life.

This week everybody was talking about another policeman killing a black man

Once again, an unarmed black person pulled over for a traffic stop winds up dead. This one is Sam DuBose in Cincinnati. The video here is maybe the worst I’ve seen. DuBose is sitting in his car, cringing backwards and holding an arm in front of his face, when the officer shoots him in the head.

The officer has been indicted for murder and has pleaded not guilty. The two officers who initially backed his made-up story (of being dragged and fearing for his life) have not been charged, apparently because they testified more accurately to the grand jury and did not directly contradict the video.

The more such cases we have on video, the more you have to wonder about the cases where there wasn’t video, and prosecutors or juries believed what the police told them.

and Cecil the Lion

An American dentist and big-game hunter killed a tagged lion who had been a major attraction in a national park in Zimbabwe. Apparently Cecil was lured out of the park to a place where he could be killed. Zimbabwe claims the killing was illegal anyway, and is asking the U.S. to extradite Dr. Walter Palmer of Minnesota.

Black activists on Twitter made very clever use of the incident with the hastag #AllLionsMatter. They have imitated all the things usually posted about victims of police shootings:

why talk about lions being killed by humans when lion on lion crime is at an all time HIGH? they’re killing their own kind!

#CecilTheLion was a thug. If he hadn’t been so intimidating, he’d still be alive today.

Here is a picture of Cecil the Lion being violent against his own that the media won’t show you. They want to always point fingers at dentists that kill lions, but never talk about the rampant lion on lion crime that takes place everyday in the wild. In addition, Cecil The Lion was found to have traces of tall yellow grass in his system, which has never been known to correlate with violence, but we will just mention it just because. If he had showed the dentist his ID and not have been outside of the Safari, this would have never happened

and Iran

Republican senators and representatives offered no serious alternative. They misrepresented testimony, dismissed contrary evidence, and substituted vitriol for analysis. They seemed baffled by the idea of having to work and negotiate with other countries. I came away from the hearings dismayed by what the GOP has become in the Obama era. It seems utterly unprepared to govern.

This is why the GOP deserves what Trump is doing to its presidential process. In a democracy, responsible political leadership is an interface between Reality and the public will. So it combines two roles: representing the public and educating it.

As you know if you’ve ever been elected to the leadership of your church or club or neighborhood group, half of your job is to do the research the members don’t all have the time to do, and then to explain Reality to them, particularly if it doesn’t work the way they think it should.

During the Obama years, Republican politicians have abandoned that educating role. They have brought out the worst in their followers, and whenever possible have taken advantage of any counter-factual notions the base might have. Why not encourage conspiracy theories like Birtherism or Jade Helm? Why not claim that cutting taxes will lower the deficit? Why make people face up to the bad news about climate change?

Trump is the logical outcome of that trend. When he says he’s going to build a wall at the border and make Mexico pay for it, or order Ford to move its factories back to the United States — well, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? At this late date, no other candidate is in the position to say, “Wait a minute. Reality doesn’t work that way.” Because none of them speak for Reality any more. It’s been a long time since anyone has told the base that Reality matters.

and Thursday’s Republican debate

The latest polls mostly just confirm what we’ve been seeing: Trump in the lead, with Walker, Bush, and Carson in the next tier. The rest of the debate stage looks like Paul, Rubio, Cruz, Huckabee, Christie, and Kasich. Rick Perry is the first man out (though he’s not that far behind Kasich). Santorum, Jindal, Fiorina, Pataki, Graham, and Gilmore won’t be there.

The need to rise in the national polls so that you’ll be on that stage has been driving the wild rhetoric we’ve been hearing. (Christie has even been advertising, which usually nobody does this early.) Once you get onto the stage, though, you need to do something to get yourself in the next morning’s headlines. I can’t wait to see what they’ll come up with.

but I was thinking about religion

An updated Religious Landscape Study by Pew Research came out in May. According to a summary on the Pew web site, the big news is the continued growth of “Nones” (people who don’t identify themselves with any particular religion) and the decline of Christians.

The report is based on 2014 data and is compared with the previous 2007 data. (See table.) The percentage of the American adult population describing themselves as either atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated rose from 16.1% to 22.8%, while the number identifying as Christian fell from 78.4% to 70.6%. Non-Christian religions grew from 4.7% to 5.9%, with Muslims (0.4% to 0.9%) and Hindus (0.4% to 0.7%) responsible for most of that increase.

That’s the kind of change I’d expect to see in a generation, not in seven years.

All major Christian groups declined (see graph to the right), but mainline Protestants and Catholics took the worst of it, with evangelical Protestants growing in number but still shrinking as a percentage of the population.

The composition of the Nones changed as well, as they shifted in a more radical direction. The percentage of atheists nearly doubled (1.6% to 3.1%), and agnostics were also up sharply (2.4% to 4%). Most of the Nones continue to describe themselves as “nothing in particular”, but within that group there was a shift towards those who said religion wasn’t important to them (as opposed to what I think of as the “spiritual but not religious” people).

As a group, the Nones are young and getting younger. Their median age declined from 38 to 36, compared to the median American adult age of 46. Among adults age 18-29, 36% are Nones compared to 56% Christian.

This is a political blog, so think about the politics of these numbers. Howard Dean took a lot of heat back in 2005 when he described Republicans as “pretty much a white Christian party“. But if you listen to the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, a lot of them really aren’t even talking to you if you’re not a white Christian. (Watch Ted Cruz’ announcement speech at Liberty University.) A lot has been made of the steady decline of whites as a percentage of the electorate, and what that means for the Republican strategy, but Christians are declining even faster.

Given that, what to make of this poll of Republicans from February? The headline was about their presidential preferences, but Question 17 was: “Would you support or oppose establishing Christianity as the national religion?” Support: 57%. Oppose: 30%. Not sure: 13%.

and white denial

David Brooks took a lot of heat two weeks ago when he wrote his response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book Between the World and Me. Like here and here and here. And I had a prior opinion: Coates is a valuable voice I frequently quote on this blog, while Brooks’ NYT column is usually a waste of one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in all of Journalism. But I decided not to pile on, because I hadn’t read Between the World and Me. For all I knew, Coates had overstepped and Brooks had a valid point.

OK, I’ve read it now. BtW&M is a beautiful piece of writing. It’s hard to read at times, particularly if you’re white, but it communicates a view that whites are not going to find in a lot of other places.

Also, it’s rare that a writer this talented just lets it rip. Coates’ pieces for The Atlantic have a measured, let-me-lay-out-the-facts tone (similar to what I aspire to here). But BtW&M is written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, and Coates just doesn’t worry about whether he sounds too sentimental or too angry or too anything. He’ll throw an ambiguous image or metaphor out there and let you figure it out. He’s on a roll, and he’s not slowing down for you.

One of the not-fully-explained terms in the book is “the Dream”. The Dream starts out as the idealized white suburban world Coates sees on TV as he’s growing up. It’s a place where people are secure and the institutions of society work almost all the time. Fears are isolated and often irrational; they get resolved before the credits run. It contrasted with the black urban Baltimore Coates was living in, where you had to choose your path to school carefully, and always be aware of who you’re walking with and whether there are enough of you. In Coates’ world, you didn’t solve problems by appealing to the proper authorities, because the authorities were a source of danger in themselves. So you lived in constant fear — everybody did. Whether you hid in your room or joined a gang and bullied others or escaped into drugs or escaped into books, you were responding to that pervasive fear.

As the book goes on, “the Dream” grows to include the self-serving, self-reinforcing, reality-denying worldview of the people who believe that the white suburban world is the whole world, people who don’t understand why everybody doesn’t just solve their problems in the easy ways they would. In the Dream, nothing is fundamentally wrong with America, it’s just that some people don’t know how to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.

In other words, the Dream is where David Brooks lives. And he responds in the way that has become typical for the privileged classes: He acts as if Coates had claimed universality for his experience, and he denies that claim. It’s like the not-all-men response to the Isla Vista murders. Brooks writes:

I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.

But why even stop there? The abject lives of the slaves was not the totality of the plantation, which also included the cultured, genteel lives of the masters. I’m sure many in the KKK lynch mobs were (at other times) good decent family men. For that matter, why do we focus just on the monstrous side of historic figures like Hitler or Stalin? No doubt there were moments in their lives where they were kind and generous and fun to hang out with. Why don’t we ever tell those stories?

The point is: You don’t have a complete picture of America if you don’t include the experiences of its underclasses. You don’t even have a complete picture of white suburban America if you don’t see how it sits next to and interacts with and (yes) oppresses those underclasses. If your knee-jerk reaction to any confrontation with underclass experience is to start waxing eloquent about Abe Lincoln and cute puppies, then you’re living in a dream world.

and seeing candidates for myself

The day after posting the Hillary Clinton edition of my 2016 series, I got to see her do a town hall meeting in a school gym in Nashua (a moderate walk from where I live).

Clinton does a really good town hall. She seemed knowledgeable about everything that came up. She’s personable, and I think the Grandma-in-Chief image is working for her. Somehow, she managed not to sweat while wearing a jacket in a hot room. She answered a lot of questions, but no one seemed to care about the email controversy.

It’s always fascinating to be at a news event and then see how the media covers it. This meeting made it to CNN (once again, I was on the wrong side of the room to be on camera), but only for the question Clinton didn’t answer: Whether or not she would approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. I will give her credit for dodging it directly: She said she wasn’t going to answer, and gave an explanation that was maybe-sorta plausible, rather than bamboozling us for a while and then claiming she had answered. (She says she started the State Department’s decision process and then handed it off to Kerry, so she won’t undercut him by saying what he should do.)

Here’s what you miss about the context: The crowd (maybe 600 people, I estimated) accepted her refusal to answer. There were no boos or protests or follow-up questions on that topic. If you just watch CNN, you’d get the impression that she’s really being dogged by this issue; if you were there, it came and went quickly.

Something I’ve noticed about townhall meetings is that certain candidates cast a kind of spell: Even if I don’t support all their policies, I start making up excuses that could allow me to vote for them. In the past I’ve noticed that effect from seeing John McCain and Wesley Clark, so I thought it was my weakness for military types. But since Tuesday I’ve been noticing the same thing with regard to Clinton. I have no explanation.

The Times has a problem covering the Clintons. There’s no getting around that conclusion. It’s a longstanding problem. It’s institutional. I am really baffled as to why they can’t simply come clean on this one.

At this stage in the campaign, candidates are mostly rallying their supporters or likely supporters, so it’s a little tricky to figure out where they’re going to be. (I found Tuesday’s meeting by walking into Clinton headquarters on Main Street in Nashua and asking.) This week I bit the bullet and signed up for the Trump campaign’s email updates. I’m waiting to see if I start getting junk mail about buying gold or joining the NRA.

and you may also be interested in …

Steve Hogarty tweeted:

Another embarrassing u-turn for climate “scientists”. First they said June was the hottest month ever recorded. Now they’re saying it’s July.

I believe this is satire, but it’s so hard to tell these days.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Facebook meme claiming that Congress made Confederate veterans into U.S. veterans in 1958. But surprise! The notion comes from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and they were lying, just like they lie about most history relating to the Civil War.

Cecil the lion, who was a local celebrity, had a distinctive black mane, so he was pretty recognizable. I think it is likely that the men who led the dentist to Cecil knew who he was and didn’t care. They certainly knew they were luring a lion out of the reserve, which is immoral, unsporting, and probably illegal.

That link that you post in the sidebar is really good. A political reporter tries to interact with the Trump campaign as if Trump was an actual candidate for President and the Trump campaign *isn’t interested*.

One quote from the article: ” I have zero to report about Trump’s plans for actually being president—except that, from all available evidence, he hasn’t given it a moment’s thought. “

Trackbacks

[…] Told by Edward Baptist, and How Propaganda Works by Jason Stanley. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World in Me got reviewed in a segment of a weekly summary; I’m not sure why I didn’t break that out […]